The Human Conditon

Yin: We are the stuff that dreams are made of. Puffs of air buffeted by the wind, fading into night.

Yang: We orbit along the event horizon of the black hole for some time, getting a little closer to crossing it each second. We eventually do cross it and it’s always there. And sometimes we can’t help but stare.

A Conclusion to a Still Unwritten Book: The End?

I previously have suggested that the universe seems to have been designed and that this therefore implies a designer. Following this supposition further leads to two fundamental questions: where did the designer come from and why might it have designed and launched the universe we inhabit. Subsidiary questions might include what materials and tools did the designer use and what can be said of the designer? We might also wonder if the designer watches or cares for us or has any of the other attributes humans have often associated with their gods such as being infinitely powerful, wise, kind, all knowing, loving, good etc?

Before taking a stab at these questions, it is worth noting that physicists and cosmologists are also trying to peer behind the curtain of creation. String theorists are still seeking – despite a lack of any experimental evidence offered by current high energy physics – to reconcile relativity and quantum physics and thereby explain the menagerie of observed elementary particles and forces. Recently, they have found a set of one quadrillion possible solutions to string equations within a ten-dimensional spacetime that have “the same set of matter particles as exists in our universe.” But there remains no experimental evidence or process for deciding which of these quadrillion, if any, may be applicable to the observed reality.

Also, for the past decade or so, cosmologists have been looking at alternatives to the inflationary scenario of the post-Big Bang universe. Inflation explains features of the cosmic background radiation. However, it does not explain from where the Big Bang itself arose beyond the suggestion that it came from some quantum fluctuation within a primordial singularity. An attractive alternative to having to explain any sort of a beginning is to assume that the Big Bang was simply our side of a “bounce” or “collision” between universes.

All these efforts to explain what might otherwise appear to be an amazing Goldilocks universe – in which all the elemental particles and forces seem to lead to the evolution of complexity and the seeming inevitability of life – must in the end still suppose something unexplained and just given: a multidimensional universe beyond ours, a singularity just sitting there at the beginning of time or a series of bouncing universes just following one another. (This latter leaves aside the issue of dark energy’s apparent speeding up of the expansion of our universe so that it never reverses into a big crunch. Instead, it seems that eventually – in some enormous 10 to the 100th years – matter will have broken down and even black holes will be warmer than space and radiate away with a final pop.)

It might also be worth pausing to wonder why the universe would have to be designed rather than simply “wished” into being as befitting an all-powerful “god.” Put another way, why would a creator need to design a universe using materials and processes that we would find understandable as laws of physics? Was the designer constrained in some way – perhaps by some preexisting Platonic Forms – to act through means such as singularities and Higgs fields?

Occam’s Razor suggests to me that we simply acknowledge that our universe seems to have a design discoverable by science and wonder about the designer. Following this line of inquiry, I return to considering where might have the designer come from and why might it have designed and launched the universe we inhabit?

It seems to me that there is no way to answer the where question. One must either posit that there never was an original moment of creation or accept that there was such a moment and recognize it as an uncaused first cause. Which came first, the chicken or the egg? Either the designer was caused – by what, from where? – or was itself the First Cause. This seems to me the unanswerable question behind all others and thus the essential mystery at the bottom of all science, religion and philosophy.

The why question may be somewhat more amenable. Consider that the universe does appear to have been designed and put into action according to the physical laws thereby built into it. Could it be a grand simulation to test theories of good and evil, a complex and especially vivid dream or simply a work of art? Might it be a majestic theater on which a countless number of actors play our parts and then disappear off stage thus making the designer a cosmic Shakespeare? Or might it have been set in motion for the consciousness behind the design to dump itself into to avoid an endless eternity of loneliness and thereby undergo an almost endless series of experiences acted through everyone and everything? I myself drift toward the last suggestion and to the possibility of a universe in which consciousness is primordial and attaches to everything with mass (a kind of panpsychism). Life would offer the most interesting existence. So perhaps the designer looks out through the being of everything, in a sense making us all “children of god?”

One last question, does love come into it at all. Does the designer love its creation or any part of it, such as us? If the cosmic consciousness is in everything, then it may be essentially a matter of self-love, even when we “love” one another. I believe we exist as individuals and we love as such. Our capability – indeed need – to love suggests it is somehow built into the design.

A Conclusion to a Still Unwritten Book: Part One

Sometime ago, I wrote in this space an Introduction to a Still Unwritten Book. For several years before and since, I have been pondering consciousness, cosmology and quantum physics in what I like to think follows in the tradition of natural philosophy. While I am not a scientist, I believe that the ultimate questions are essentially unanswerable but – following Saint Thomas’ finger – the proper subject of a reasoning intellect. It seems to me that the most fundamental question remains one that has haunted all philosophical and religious traditions: why is there anything? Science alone cannot shed light on this. Current science points to a Big Bang some 13 billion years ago. Today’s quantum physics and cosmology can say much about the first few moments after that event and the subsequent evolution of the universe and life. But we cannot say much about where the Big Bang came from and even less about why it might have occurred. Nor can we explain – without positing an infinity of less comfortable parallel universes – why our universe seems so right for us.

So the ultimate questions – why should there be anything, why should there be us – remain unanswered. It would seem that nothing is the more natural state because it would need no explanation. That there was nothing and always would be nothing would require nothing to be done or said about it. That nothing somehow gave way to something, anything, would have required a departure from the most simple state of nothing to greater complexity. The universe, in which we find ourselves a part, exists, it is something. Furthermore, it seems to have been fine-tuned insofar as it expresses a particular set of physical laws that seem designed to make life and intelligence inevitable. We live in a Goldilocks’ reality, not too cold, not too hot, but just right for us. The apparent design that gave rise to our existence must inevitably imply a designer.

But granting all this, this still leaves two fundamental questions. Where did the designer come from and why might it have designed and launched the universe we inhabit. The possible answers to the first question appear to converge on two possibilities, that the designer always was – i.e., that something always existed and there never was nothing – or that there was an original act of creation (or self-creation) that led to the existence of the designer. Both of these “explanations” essentially define what we might call God. One of them must be true.

The second question, why did the designer enact the particular act of creation that led to us, could have a myriad of answers. It might have been from boredom – as an eternity of nothing but self might eventually wear thin – perhaps in the form of a cosmic-scale version of a computer SimUniverse. It could be the night’s sleep of a very rationally-minded dreamer. It could be an experiment of some kind, or a simulation set to explore possible design parameters. It could be an act of love. Whatever the possible reason, the act of creation implied a kind of consciousness (even of the sleeper) and some version of a conscious choice. The designer must have been a conscious entity, perhaps even consciousness in its rare form. Whether the designer always was or was somehow created, the form it had or took was consciousness. In either case, consciousness was primordial, coming before the creation of our universe, before matter, before the Big Bang. The primordial consciousness – what might be called God – was the designer.

A fascinating aside about following this chain of thought is the seemingly inescapable conclusion that the designer was or felt constrained to create a universe capable of being apprehended by scientific reason. The universe is not just some stage set on which we players play our parts but an intricate mechanism that obeys its own complex, intrinsic laws. This suggests that the designer was using – for whatever reason – a given toolbox that provided the means to form the particular set of physical parameters manifested in the Big Bang.

Still, why us? What are we and what were we made for? I lean toward the notion that the cosmic consciousness designed a reality that it could then enter, whether out of loneliness, curiosity, love or some combination of these. 

TBC... 

There is a Ghost in the Machine

Fascinating to think that all the minutia of our mental activity is governed so strictly by physical matter and biology. It must be so. We are at base material objects descending from the Big Bang.

Consciousness however is not reducible to mental activity. Consciousness is pure awareness. Through consciousness we can be aware of our mind -- physical processes become thoughts, feelings, emotions, dreams, visions, sensing. The good bit about this is that awareness continues. In the beginning was awareness. It also means that higher processing speeds are possible.

Consciousness is not quantized. Nor is it digital but “analog.” Physical reality and time are quantum.